Daily Inspiration Quote by Åsne Seierstad

Panic, dressed up as responsibility: that is the engine inside Seierstad's line. "If I leave, reality will devour me" flips the usual moral hierarchy. Reality is not the solid ground you return to; it's the predator. For a journalist embedded in someone else's catastrophe, "leaving" isn't just exiting a place. It's stepping out of a story-world where survival is measured in immediate tasks - listening, recording, staying useful - and back into a life where the mind has time to replay what it couldn't stop.

The second sentence tightens the screw. "Then they will all really be dead" isn't a claim about literal resurrection; it's about memory as a form of provisional life. As long as the witness remains inside the narrative, the people she is documenting are still present, still speaking, still unfinished. Departure threatens a double death: their physical loss, and the quieter disappearance that happens when attention moves on and the world files them under "past."

Seierstad's intent reads as both confession and indictment. Confession, because she admits the selfish utility of proximity: staying close to danger can postpone grief. Indictment, because it exposes how war reporting turns human beings into a fight over meaning. The subtext is brutal: the witness needs the witnessed, not only to tell their story, but to keep her own psyche from collapsing under the ordinary safety she supposedly craves. In that tension - between duty, exploitation, and the terror of normalcy - the line lands.